by Simon Raven
‘–Attendant?–’
‘–Listen with patience, and all will be made plain. There was the Greco complaining about Nicos’ shorts and vest, and there was Nicos saying that they were, after all, on holiday, and there was the Greco saying that was no reason for his attendant to make an exhibition of himself, and the end of it was that Nicos stopped the car – he was driving – while they were on their way through the modern town of Monemvasia, and went into some store, and bought a white shirt and some grey trousers…into which he intended to change, in order to put an end to the Greco’s grizzling, as soon as opportunity offered. Which it did when they had crossed the causeway into the old town and walked up as far as the little court of ruined houses near the first church. So while the Greco kept “cave” Nicos went into one of the shells of houses to change – and just then we appeared. Nicos saw us through a window, heard the Greco trying to move us on, and being anxious for a spot of company other than the Greco’s he came rushing out in his knickers, in order to greet us before we left and make sure of keeping us there. In the event, as you know, he only kept me, and it was then that he did the explaining. First, about how he came to be in his knickers and nothing else, and secondly how it was that the Greco was entitled to boss him about in this annoying fashion.’
They came to a second bridge, and this time crossed the canal, on the other side of which many people were lunching vociferously under trellised vines. Their accents were not of the prettiest.
‘Lunch now, or after we’ve seen the cathedral?’ Fielding asked.
‘After. Perhaps this appalling crew will be gone by then.’
‘Come, come, Jeremy. They’re only harmless tourists who’ve come here on the Harry’s Bar boat.’
‘Why couldn’t the bloody thing sink? I tell you, Fielding, the more I see of the human race the more I loathe it.’
‘This is hardly,’ said Fielding, peering with his single eye, ‘a typical cross-section.’
‘Typically loathesome.’
‘I dare say they don’t much care for you and me either. Go on about Nicos and Greco.’
As they began to cross a tiny meadow, Jeremy said, ‘Nicos was an orphan in the Mani. When he was sixteen he was taken on by Greco Barraclough, who was at that time living and researching in Vatheia, not far from Areopolis, where Nicos had been brought up by a set of poor cousins who shared him round between them. Barraclough liked the idea of an attendant and had heard of Nicos as a prospect – his parents had been educated people, far superior to the cousins – so he went to see him and found him only too eager to get quit of his life in Areopolis. After a lot of Greek chin-thrusting, it was eventually agreed that the Greco should adopt Nicos in the local manner…which meant paying off the cousins, who were just beginning to get a bit of value out of Nicos as a labourer on their wretched bits of land, and swearing an oath to protect, educate and support him until he was twenty-five years of age. Nicos, for his part, had to swear to serve, honour and obey Barraclough for the same period. He became, in effect, his “squire-cum-bodyservant”.’
They walked along a dank and gritty narthex and came to a man who was selling tickets by the south door of the cathedral.
‘Five hundred lire…to enter a sacred building?’ Jeremy said.
‘I’m not sure it hasn’t been deconsecrated. Worth every penny in any case. I suppose all went well with Nicos and Greco until they came to England. Then Nicos found out that “serve, honour and obey” weren’t fashionable words any more?’
‘Right. When the Greco was made Fellow of Lancaster, he brought Nicos with him and persuaded Sir Thomas Llewyllyn, as Provost, to give Nicos a place as an undergraduate.’
‘The more fool Tom.’
‘So it turned out. The Greco’s demands on Nicos’ time and energy prevented Nicos from doing his work properly or making friends of his own age. His existence was barely known about – outside a small circle of dons who were friends of the Greco. Nicos began to make noises, he said, couldn’t the Kyrios Barraclough moderate his requirements and give Nicos more time to himself? No, the Kyrios Barraclough could not. He reminded Nicos very sharply of the oath he had sworn – a serious matter in the Mani – and also reminded him that it was only because of his influence with Tom that Nicos had a place at Lancaster at all, a place in which he was maintained by Barraclough’s money.’
They walked past the slender columns of the rood screen and stood under the Bishop’s crude throne, looking at the Virgin above it, who wept her one huge tear.
‘So far,’ said Jeremy, ‘Barraclough is winning on points. But he thinks that you are just the sort of person who might interest yourself in the matter and pipe a ditty to lead Nicos a dance away from his master.’
‘Then he’s wrong. What should I have to do with penniless foreigners?’
‘Major Gray,’ said a small voice. ‘Fielding Gray. Fielding.’ Jeremy and Fielding turned sharply. A slight figure in the Franciscan habit stood between them and the rood screen. Below the skirt of his habit his legs were bare; one foot was sandalled, the other encased in a bulky surgical boot.
‘Major Gray. Fielding.’
A small voice from the past. It entreated him to know its owner and his name. Come now… A tower in a Venetian garden and a pretty Sicilian face, with smile like Lazarus risen.
‘Oh, Piero,’ he said. And then, stupidly, ‘What are you doing here?’
‘I am still living where you last saw me, at our Convent on the Island of San Francesco del Deserto. I have come to Torcello to collect a wounded seagull, and take it back for my brothers’ care. I have only minutes to spare, Major Gray, for if the tide is too low I cannot reach our landing stage, and if I wait for the next tide they will punish me. So come with me, please, to my barge: I have so much to ask you. And perhaps you will introduce me to your friend?’
‘This is Jeremy Morrison. And this, Jeremy, is Brother Piero…or have they given you another name?’
‘Piero still serves.’
He turned his face up to look at Jeremy’s, placed his hands together, and bowed.
‘You are so pale, Piero,’ Fielding said.
‘The air in the Lagoon is not healthy. The food is sparse. Come.’
Outside the south door Piero picked up a cage in which was a small yellow seagull. It flapped its left wing against the bars. The right wing hung limp, at an evil angle. A squeal came from a broken beak.
‘It is horrible,’ Piero said. ‘Follow, please. My barge is by the Devil’s Bridge. Tell me, tell me first of Lykiadopoulos. I dreamed that he was dead, here in Venice.’
‘Your dream did not lie.’
‘A good, kind man, for all his jealousy. And Miss Baby, Miss Baby Llewyllyn?’
‘Married. To Lord Canteloupe, whom you will also remember. They have,’ said Fielding grimly, ‘a son.’
‘And you, Fielding?’
‘I do not complain.’
‘And Tom Llewyllyn?’
‘Tom is distinguished. Provost of his College.’
‘Ah. The Lancaster College of Cambridge. I remember.’ Piero nodded in confirmation of his own remark and hobbled faster in front of them. The monk’s tonsure was absurd, obscene, in his curly black hair.
‘Tom did not like me,’ Piero said. ‘He suffered me for Daniel’s sake.’
‘Tom came to know your worth.’
Piero turned interrogatively.
‘We all did.’
‘Piero the whore,’ said Piero, ‘Lykiadopoulos’ whore. Piero the monk, watching the grave of his friend on an island drowned in fog. And yet there are good days, Fielding, Jeremy, days when I can see the mountains with their snow, blue days and clear, and the birds chatter in the cages which my brothers have made for them.’
They all came to the Devil’s bridge.
‘For nearly five years I have watched by Daniel’s grave…when they find no other task for me. They are not hard men, you understand, but there is a discipline to be followed. And the food is so wret
ched. And the days, especially in the fog, the days are so long, Fielding, Jeremy. I must not call you “Jeremy”. I have hardly met you. I am not of your world.’
‘Piero,’ Jeremy said.
‘Nor of yours any more,’ Piero said to Fielding. ‘I must go now.’ He lowered the cage into the brown barge under the bridge and prepared to follow it.
‘Piero,’ Fielding said.
‘Stay,’ said Jeremy. ‘A gift for the good brothers.’
From where Fielding stood it seemed a very large gift: a thick wodge of 10,000 Lire notes. As Piero took it, Jeremy leaned forward and whispered into Piero’s ear, so close that he might have been kissing it. For a short while Piero listened; then he shook his head and moved it bleakly away from Jeremy’s and then, deliberately keeping his face turned away from both Jeremy and Fielding, he climbed down into the barge, his surgical boot hitting the bottom with a bang that echoed under the Devil’s Bridge.
‘Piero,’ said Jeremy. ‘Say something, if only goodbye.’
But Piero huddled over the engine and pulled the starting cord.
‘Piero,’ said Fielding.
For the second time the engine failed to start. And the third. Piero picked up an oar from the bottom of the barge, and stood.
‘Piero,’ called Jeremy and Fielding.
‘Please. Go now,’ said Piero, keeping his back to them. He began to row in the style of a gondolier. ‘You see,’ he called, still without turning, ‘there are useful things which my brothers have taught me, they have taught me to row in the old manner. Besides,’ he called, ‘I have made a promise, when I first came to them. A promise to Daniel too.’
Jeremy and Fielding started to walk along the path by the canal, behind Piero’s barge and towards the Lagoon.
‘Do not follow me,’ called Piero, sensing though not seeing what they did. ‘Please do not follow me, Fielding, Jeremy, as I call you for the last time. Go to your luncheon under the vine trellises with good people from Harry’s Bar.’
Under the vine trellises Fielding, at Jeremy’s request, told him about Piero.
‘Venice,’ he said, ‘autumn, 1973. A very odd season. Some of us were here for a PEN Conference. There was also a Greek called Lykiadopoulos…not here for the PEN Conference, but to run a Baccarat Bank at the Winter Casino. Somewhere or other he had picked up Piero, a lame Sicilian boy, who at that time, though he was officially supposed to be seventeen and occasionally looked it, can hardly have seen his fifteenth summer.’
‘Younger and younger these pick-ups are getting. Was Piero born lame?’
‘No. There’d been a street accident when he was a child in Syracuse. Of course his foot had been badly treated and often gave him great pain…which I suppose was what made him look much older some of the time. You saw how…shrivelled he looked today.’
‘But not aged. A bit peaky but still…fetching. And how did you and your friends get in on all this back in 1973?’
‘Lykiadopoulos had a business partner called Max de Freville–’
‘–Ah. The skeleton at the feast. The one who stood as Godfather, with you, to Canteloupe’s son, Sarum.’
‘Right. Max was an old and very close friend of Canteloupe, who, being then as now a publisher, was attending the PEN jamboree as an interested spectator. Someone spotted Max and Lyki and Piero getting out of a gondola at the water entrance of a potty Palazzo which they’d hired, and we were all introduced there by Canteloupe.’
‘And then you all started lusting after pretty Piero, who fled for his life to a monastery?’
‘No one did any lusting. Lykiadopoulos would not allow lust, not even between Piero and himself. The name of the game that autumn was strictly chastity. All round.’
‘Something must have been afoot, or you wouldn’t be putting that special dramatic face on.’
‘Have you ever heard,’ said Fielding with reluctance, ‘of Daniel Mond?’
‘I’ve heard him mentioned. Dim mathematician. Fellow of Lancaster. Now dead.’
‘He died in Venice. That autumn. That winter. Tom Llewyllyn was with him to take care of him. They lived in a little casino, a specially furnished summerhouse, in the garden of Lyki’s and Max’s Palazzo. Canteloupe arranged that. Piero used to come from the Palazzo to see them, though Lykiadopoulos didn’t like his going and Tom Llewyllyn didn’t like his coming.’
‘Yes. Piero said as much just now.’
‘But Daniel Mond liked it. He and Piero went on little trips…as long as Danny was strong enough. When Danny died Piero arranged for him to be buried on the Island of San Francesco del Deserto, and entered himself as a Friar in the Convent there.’
‘There has to be more to it than that.’
‘There was. I can’t explain it all…beyond saying that Piero loved Daniel in some extraordinary way. And vice versa.’
Fielding appeared to think that that was now that and all was one for it, but Jeremy tried a little marginal persistence.
‘I noticed,’ Jeremy said, ‘that Piero asked after Miss Baby Llewyllyn.’
‘Yes. At the beginning Baby was there with Tom for a holiday before going back to school. Canteloupe escorted her home, as I remember.’
‘So,’ said Jeremy, ‘some went home and others stayed: one died and another entered a convent where the body was buried. There must have been, I repeat, a great deal more to it.’
Fielding shrugged, put his hand through his hair and sighed from his twisted mouth.
‘I’m not one,’ said Jeremy, ‘to stick my nose in where it isn’t wanted. Let the dead bury their dead. But an inoffensive question about the living suggests itself: surely, Fielding, the Franciscans are a mendicant order? They’re meant to move about, not hang around on islands, as Piero has for the last five years.’
‘I dare say that’s all changed. Anyhow, that convent is for training novices and housing the old and ill.’
‘And just which is Piero? If he joined in 1973 he can hardly still be a novice.’
‘Perhaps…they keep him there because of his poor foot. In any case, he joined on special terms – Lykiadopoulos put up some money. Perhaps they respect his wish to stay near Daniel’s grave.’
‘He seems to think that he’s now done a long enough stint, to judge from his remarks this morning. He seemed altogether restless, wouldn’t you say?’
‘I really didn’t notice,’ said Fielding, who had in fact been deeply moved by the encounter but now wished, once and for all, to forget it. ‘As I told you in the cathedral just before he made himself known, it is not my habit to concern myself with penniless foreigners.’
As the boat carried them from the landing stage on Torcello to the little harbour in Burano, Jeremy Morrison thought about two things. First of all he thought about Piero; but this thought he speedily dismissed, telling himself, with the plain good sense of his kind, that he had done what he had done and that the result would be what it would be. Since what he had done was to give Piero nearly £100 worth of lire, his mind, forbidden to dwell uselessly on Piero, at once turned to money.
Of this he had plenty, if he cashed the sterling which he had brought as a reserve, to see him back to England, even though Fielding planned to take a good week in crossing France and was not attracted to cheap hotels. Since car, petrol and meals taken outside hotels (in practice almost all meals) were paid for by Fielding under the heading of travelling expenses, Jeremy would not be strapped for cash to pay for his nightly beds, however luxurious these might turn out to be. The trouble, he told himself, would come when he arrived home. True, he could spend the few remaining days of his vacation in some comfort in the family house at Luffham by Whereham, and true again that by the time he returned to Lancaster College his quarterly allowance of £750 would have been paid into his banking account and would be, for once in a way, unencumbered. The fact remained that all other resources, in June still very substantial, had now been dissipated, and that £750 was not going to support him, in the manner to which he was beginning t
o become accustomed, until the end of December. Even if he stayed in his rooms and minded his books during the Term, there would come a problem of how to amuse himself, after the obligatory Christmas at home with his father, over the New Year. Plans were already making, among his acquaintance, for skiing parties or cultural excursions at that time, and the one thing about which all such arrangements were exigent (particularly the cultural ones, it seemed) was the absolute need for grim deposits in ready money… ‘Pretty soon, Jeremy dear, like November one latest. And don’t forget you’ll need a nice fat packet in your pocket – there are several interesting restaurants with two and three rosettes in Michelin which we all want to try…’
All in all, thought Jeremy, a studious but civilised term, followed by a suitable and reviving holiday, would require (even if the holiday were followed in its turn by a period of Lenten meanness) a good £1,000 over and above what he was going to get. So where to apply for that? His father? ‘Dread Sire, today at Ascot I’ – no, never, not on that pretext or any other. Fielding? Too early in their friendship; besides, for all Fielding’s apparently effortless expenditure on this present tour, he had begun to exhibit, when getting out his Credit Cards, a sort of arithmetical expression about the mouth which indicated that he too was going home to problems, was not looking forward to the day on which the American Express account would come in. No: not Fielding; not yet. Well then: his friends at Lancaster, the two Salinger girls? They must be vastly rich now that their father had croaked. The trouble was, he, Jeremy, had tapped Theodosia for a pretty shrewd sum in April and had much offended Carmilla a few weeks later. So his stock in that quarter was low. Perhaps he could pay back the one (in very small part, as a gesture) and make it up with the other, and then marry whichever would have him? A bore, being married, of course, so the thing to do was to goad his bride into divorce as quickly as possible, and then claim half the loot. That was the way of it, he’d heard, these days. Fantasy, idle fantasy, first things first, and the first thing was to raise £1,000, so that there need be no more worry or annoyance for the time being, by (say) the twenty-fifth of October. What about Len? Len would half die of laughter while refusing…though at the same time he might have some useful suggestions, one of which would almost certainly be Ptolemaeos Tunne. Yes: Ptolemaeos Tunne in his house in the fens; Jeremy might well be able, as indeed he had been able before, to make himself very useful in that region…in which case, a modest request, tactfully preferred…
